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View from the Top - Part
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PROFILE
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Nick Church
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Company: CPA.
Interviewee: Nick Church.
Job Title: IT Manager.
The Subject: Legal services firm
CPA is using integration technology to help it process
very large amounts of client information, enabling it
to rapidly grow its business volumes.
PERSONAL FILE
NAME: Nick Church.
BACKGROUND: Nick started working
for CPA in 1996. His first role was infrastructure manager
for CPA Software, a subsidiary responsible for developing
a Windows-based intellectual property management system,
ALECTO.
In 2001, he helped set up the Business
Take-on Team, carrying out pre and post-sales work and
supporting clients using CPA’s services. During this
time he was involved in the selection of Data Junction
(now Pervasive Data Integrator) as a way of mapping
client data to and from CPA’s data exchange formats.
He joined the IS Department in 2002,
as a founder member of the Systems Integration Team,
responsible for delivering intellectual property data
transfer systems internally and externally. He designed
a suite of Data Integrator-based processes to replace
a legacy mapping system whilst improving overall electronic
data transfer (EDT).
Since August 2004, he has been part
of the Systems Architecture Team, responsible for defining
CPA’s future electronic interface strategy.
Before working at CPA, Nick spent
eight years in pre-press (part of the printing industry).
He worked for both Monotype and Linotype, now both disappeared.
He also worked for Hyphen, the first company to promote
software PostScript processing; this company is also
gone, now part of Adobe Systems.
Nick graduated from Warwick University
in 1988 with a BSc honours degree in electronic engineering.
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Q: CPA IS AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (IP)
SERVICE PROVIDER – WHAT DOES THAT MEAN EXACTLY?
A: CPA was formed in 1969 by a group of IP attorneys – CPA’s
partner firms – as an offshore processing centre to manage
patent, design and later trademark renewals. You could say
that we are a branch of the legal profession.
Trademarks are abstract elements that constitute an idea
– like the McDonalds golden arches; their shape, size and
colour are elements of the trademark.
A patent is an agreement between an inventor and a government
to give the inventor a monopoly over their invention for a
certain time. Edison patented the light bulb, for example.
A patent gives you the chance to build up an industrial process
around your invention – it’s also there to encourage development.
People can look at what has been patented, and improve on
it. To get a patent the invention has to be novel.
Other types of intellectual property that can be protected
and require some form of management or maintenance are designs;
for example, the shape of an iPod and more recently, domain
names like www.macdonalds.com or www.bbc.co.uk.
As well as managing patent, design and trademark renewals
and domain name portfolios for clients, further services include
trademark searching, which helps clients to avoid litigation
for infringing existing trademarks; and trademark watching
– to police any potential infringement of their own trademarks.
CPA has also developed a patent analytics proposition, which
essentially enables clients to align their business and IP
strategies through the analysis of patent data. Companies
can use the analysis to determine what the competition are
doing – where they are spending money on R&D, the patents
they own etc, in addition to auditing their own patent portfolios.
Patent or trademarks owners are required to pay renewal fees.
However these differ from country to country, as do government
regulations. CPA deals with over 200 IP jurisdictions around
the world, with clients ranging from large multinationals
to lone inventors. CPA has approximately 60,000 clients and,
as you can imagine, this generates a need for high-level administrative
support.
More...
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Conspectus 2005
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Copyright © 2005
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